Thanks everyone - I for one am really enjoying this discussion. What I wanted to do here was to bring together and react to some of the many excellent points made so far. "Shadowing your posts" see?.....OK, the things I do for a on on a chapter title.....

Yes, the Valar seem a fairly civilized and dignified lot. We don't seem to have gods for mostly-harmless-wild-abandon (like Pan or Dionysius, say). It's more the College Fellows dining than the student body with their drinking games, pranks and the impromptu invention of the most excellent sports such as "Blindfold Bicycle Jousting" to put a number of them in the Minor Injuries Unit by the end of their evening

OK, I'm convinced by the argument that the Valar choose male or female and then are stuck like that - potentially interesting, as perhaps we get an insight into what JRRT feels is naturally masculine or feminine. Similarly, I am looking forward to Ungoliant, to see how JRRT handles a female villain. My intentionally ridiculous comment about "Melkorina" seems to have led us into some interesting territory. I should say that I personally don't think Middle-earth would be improved by being more "pulpy" ("Fifty Shades of Gandalf the Grey?" Noooooooooooooooooo!!!!) But thinking about "pulpy" fiction and imagining the ridiculous B-movie "Melkorina" portrayed as a kind of evil Deja Thoris led me to realize: Tolkien was writing during the same period as Edgar Rice Burroughs (first published 1912) and H P Lovecraft (first published 1917). Quite likely these authors had no influence on Tolkien whatsoever (unless the Tolkien historians here know otherwise?), or whether that leads us anywhere.....

Classification mania - yes, Tolkien could have gone a lot further than his list of Valar and descriptions. I'm thinking of various interests of my children over the years; Teletubbies, Thomas the Tank Engine, Power Rangers, Pokemon.... Shows with a cast of discrete characters, each with a distinct and never-to-grow-or-vary personality, associations with an element, colour, favourite object, weapon or attribute. Evidently that kind of thing appeals quite widely (and also must be a great aid to potboiler writing processes). Moving out of the word of modern fiction, one could cite the elaborate list of Christian Saints (with their attributes, feast days, patronages etc.). Instead of something that sounds like it is churned out of a database or Top Trumps game, we do get some nice thumbnail sketches.

Made-up words: yes, I think it is a good point that Tolkien was professionally very well equipped to make up feasible-sounding "English" words. As opposed to thinking of something phonic with lots of low-frequency letters in it in a rather lame attempt to be outlandish. Perhaps that reduces the risk that we "catch him out" inventing stuff. As opposed to, say, some of the names of Star Wars characters - some of which are so odd that they give rise to the game that your Official Star Wars name is a combination of a car you've driven and a medicine you've taken (e.g. "Zantac Mondeo"). Moreover, Tolkien was given to puzzling out what his names meant and how a character or thing would "go" with that name. I'm not a Tolkien-philology-scholar (any present, please do speak up with insights into the names in this chapter!) but I wonder whether he was getting the names right for the subconscious mind of his reader- so that subconsciously we get the feeling that "you do know my name, though you don't remember that I belong to it." And so it seems right already and we're not just required to take the author's word for it that "I am Gandalf, and Gandalf means me!" I wonder what Tolkien's works are like to read in translation to a language far away from English and its North European sibling languages: translation into Japanese, Korean or Chinese, say? There, this effect ought to break down (unless you translate the names to restore it). If we should have any multi-lingual readers able to say, I'd be most interested.

The sea - does seem to have a special place (once more). It needs two Maiar for it's different characters, and is hated by Melkor because it won't do what he tells it. Going back to an earlier conversation some us had about character alignments, Melkor is all for systems and order - provided they are HIS order. The idea of throwing some big waves at your sea wall just to see if he could get one over the top would appeal to Osse, I think. The sea wall might be demolished as a consequence, and he'd be all "Ooops!" . Whereas Melkor would be inflicting damage out of spite, or as part of a plan. Not too surprising that he didn't take over allegiance of the sea Maiar for long...

Artificing and hubris - we're told that Aulë is most like Melkor; they have a joint love of creating things. But (as raised in the Secret Fire) post above, that brings risks of wanting to push your art too far, or get too wedded to what you've made. While we're to understand that Melkor has recruited several Maiar, the only named defector is Sauron, who defects from Aulë. I'm a aware of two places in chapters to come where the temptations and frustrations following from creativity come up big-time. To avoid spoilers, I shall say just "dwarves" and "simarils". We should be sure to give this theme a good discussion in due course, but I suggest we want to wait for a later chapter, when we can bring in more examples without spoilers?

Do you see any other themes first surfacing here, which we'll want to not and discuss later?

Well, that devoured my lunchtime most pleasurably! Best wishes from cloudy Oxfordshire. No sign of a plume of smoke from the direction of Wolvercote Cemetry; so if the good Professor is turning in his grave in wrath about Melkorina etc., he can't be rotating fast enough for combustion!